Law Departments Move Up Maturity Curve

The 2020 Legal Operations Maturity Benchmarking Report, prepared by the Association of Corporate Counsel, in partnership with Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory, is a serious effort. Based on the ACC Legal Ops Maturity Model and responses from 316 legal departments across 29 countries and 24 industries, the report assesses in-house performance with a granularity rarely seen. By looking across 15 functions and 92 sub-functions, ranging from financial management and information governance to strategic planning and innovation management, the survey uses a six-point scale to come up with an average maturity rate among participating law departments:

Among many other takeaways, the study clearly shows that companies with legal ops professionals are further along on the maturity journey. That’s not surprising. What is surprising, however, is how far most corporate law departments still have to go. In 12 of 15 areas, the average maturity level is the beginning of intermediate stage 1. Only two functions, compliance and financial management, score above 3. The lowest scores are for change management (2.38), e-discovery/litigation management (2.37), and innovation management (2.09). Finally, while the top 10% of law departments are operating at an advanced stage on the maturity curve, not a single one reports being at an advanced level across all functions. So even for those departments doing well, there is still plenty left to do. For much more data, including industry-specific information, check out the full report at acc.com/maturity-benchmarking2020.